Page 41 of Sean's Sunshine
Sean half-laughed. “Mostly emotional. You’ve seen it. Drunk me.”
“Totally livable. But those are the big things,” Billy said. He paused. “Not the biggest thing—”
“Later,” Sean told him gruffly. “Later. We’ll deal with that elephant later.”
“Fair.”
They watched the show for a few minutes, and when the next commercial break came on, Billy paused the screen.
“Did you really mean it? About me spending the night in your bed?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
There was a moment in which Sean could tell something was eating him up inside.
“What?”
“Your ex. Mr. Fire-douche.”
“Jesse?” God, Sean didn’t want to think about him.
“He ever just spend the night?”
Sean didn’t even have to think about it. “Nope. If there was no sex, there was no sleeping over.” He grimaced. “In fact, when he came to get his stuff, about the only things he grabbed were his DVDs and his condoms. I don’t think he’d even left a toothbrush here.”
“Douche,” Billy muttered.
Sean took this next question delicately. “Do you have one of those in your rearview?”
Billy shook his head. “No,” he said, voice soft. “Mine was… well, he was sweet. We weren’t going to be forever, but see,” he said, sitting up and turning on the couch so he could hug his knees to his chest, “I was supposed to go into the military, but that didn’t pan out—you know that.”
Sean nodded. Billy ate with him every day, and Sean had needed to trust that, with intercoms everywhere, Billy wouldn’t backslide. “Yeah.”
“So I ended up going to junior college. Wasn’t bad. Got my job at the café, waited tables. Came home, helped Mom with the little kids. Dad was still an asshole, right, but he didn’t hit me anymore, ’cause I was big enough to hit back, mostly, and he left Mom and the little kids alone because I was there. It was tolerable, right?”
Sean nodded, thinking that tolerable was an overstatement, but still. Could have been worse.
“So I get my first boyfriend, and he’s sweet. Like I said, not forever, but, you know, lots of necking in my parents’ minivan. Very young-adult novel. And that was fine.”
“What happened?”
He grimaced. “My little brother, Miguel. We dropped him off at soccer and watched as he ran out to the field, and Sam kissed me, and I kissed back, and suddenly Miguel was getting back in the minivan before we even knew he’d returned because he’d forgotten his shin guards. He caught us, dead to rights, and he didn’t say anything tous, but he went back to the field and told his coach.”
“Oh no.”
“Guy was super liberal. Didn’t even occur to him that he’d be opening up a can of worms when my mom came to pick Miguel up and he told her. So there I was, thinking, ‘Whew, little man didn’t even notice,’ and Mom gets home, and suddenly Miguel’s spilling everything to Dad, and….”
Billy shook his head. “And I’m showing up at my boyfriend’s shitty apartment with my schoolbooks in my backpack and my clothes in garbage bags and a face full of bruises. Sam—well, he was pretty stand-up. Let me stay, let me live with him really, but after a year of that, he got accepted to a school down south, and….”
“You weren’t invited?” Sean probed.
“I didn’t want to go.” Billy shrugged. “We… we were mostly roommates, like you said. But then we really weren’t that serious in the first place. Just… convenient. It wasn’t gonna go anywhere when it wasn’t convenient no more.” He paused, and those eyes—so much more complex than Sean had ever fathomed. “Not like you.”
It was Sean’s turn to swallow. “You think we could go far?”
Billy looked down. “It’s stupid. So stupid. I… I’ve hooked up with a lot of guys.”
Sean’s mouth twisted. “I’ve hooked up with some losers,” he admitted. Jesse hadn’t been the only douchebag in his closet. “Only….” He smiled, thinking that when he could see this impulse through to its natural conclusion, what hewantedto do was lean in for a hot, hungry kiss, the kind that would wipe all their doubts away. He’d kiss the pulse in Billy’s throat and explore the wonders of his clavicles and then his amazing chest. If he’d been in top form, they would be at leastmaking out, but instead, they were forced into this horror of horrors: honest communication.
